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The Academy of American Poets is the largest membership-based nonprofit organization fostering an appreciation for contemporary poetry and supporting American poets. For over three generations, the Academy has connected millions of people to great poetry through programs such as National Poetry Month, the largest literary celebration in the world; Poets.org, the Academy’s popular website; American Poets, a biannual literary journal; and an annual series of poetry readings and special events. Since its founding, the Academy has awarded more money to poets than any other organization.

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Cole Swenson was born in Kentfield, California, in 1955. She received her BA degree and MA from San Francisco State University, and a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Santa Cruz.

She is the author of more than ten collections of poetry, including Gravesend (University of California Press, 2012), finalist for the LA Times Book Prize in Poetry; The Glass Age (Alice James Books, 2007); The Book of a Hundred Hands (University of Iowa Press, 2005); Goest (Alice James Books, 2004), finalist for the National Book Award; Such Rich Hour (University of Iowa Press, 2001); Oh (Apogee Press, 2000); Try (University of Iowa Press, 1999), winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize and winner of the San Francisco State Poetry Center Book Award; Noon (Sun & Moon Press, 1997), winner of the New American Writing Award; Numen (Burning Deck Press, 1995), a finalist for the PEN West Award in Poetry; and New Math (William Morrow & Co., 1988), winner of the National Poetry Series.

With David St. John, she edited the anthology American Hybrid: A Norton Anthology of New Poetry (Norton, 2009).

About her work, poet Michael Palmer writes, “Cole Swensen attends fixedly to those minute nuances and wanderings of language whereby the poem builds its particular perceptual logic. The result might well be called a ‘new math,’ or perhaps a calculus of light, shedding new light on things immediately before the eye.”

Swensen was awarded a 2006 Guggenheim Fellowship.

She taught at the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa until 2012 when she joined the faculty of Brown University's Literary Arts Program.

A Ghost

Cole Swensen, 1955

erodes the line between being and place becomes the place of being time and sothe house turns in the snow is why a ghost always has the architecture of a stormThe architect tore down room after room until the sound stopped. A ghost is oneamong the ages at the edge of a cliff empty sails on the bay even when a shipor the house moves off in fog asks you out loud to let the stranger in